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DOOM, OOMedia, and the struggle for middle-class respectability and political legitimacy

Posted on:25 October 2012

By:worker

<table><tr><td> Different activist factions now compete for a monopoly on the Occupy brand like vultures and hyenas fighting over a rotting carcass. Each tries to outdo the other with their facile demonization of assorted miscreants. The combined message is that anyone -- regardless of political self-identification -- who dresses in black and has pale skin is now a legitimate target; not just for suspicion, but for active denunciation to the police if not physical assault by reactionary vigilantes. The true political nature and class loyalty of these squawkers has never been more clear.

As we mark the anniversary of OPD's gratuitously brutal clearing of the Plaza, it's obvious that the demoralizing effects of state repression have taken their toll on everyone involved in Occupy Oakland. Long-established left-liberals and their newbie acolytes, who merely paid lip service to the more radical aspects of the reclamation of public space, have reverted to their instinctive position: polite pseudo-opposition, which means first and foremost a respect for capitalism and those who protect it. How else are these self-described progressives to make themselves known as politically legitimate actors, worthy of acknowledgement and recognition by powerbrokers looking for the next generation of the managers of revolt? DOOM and the OO Media Committee have finally made their true intentions obvious: to drive an irreversible wedge between pro- and anti-capitalists, between good and bad protesters, between politicians and those who understand they can only represent themselves.</td><td><img title="The AADC of the ABB reporting for duty!" src="http://anarchistnews.org/files/pictures/2012/wolfmelon.jpg"></td></tr></...

Occupy ceased to be of much interest once the name began to be used for the implicitly middle-class strategies of foreclosure defense (homeownership being the epitome of bourgeois respectability) and the propping up of institutionalized state-enforced education (which has nothing to do with intellectual development or imbuing young people with critical thinking skills). Those who engage in these reformist campaigns, those who denounce and attack others who do not respect the cops or capitalist property, those who are quietly or loudly stumping for Obama's re-election are not merely misguided comrades, and it's high time we accepted what has been obvious since last October: middle-class factions within Occupy Oakland were always the greatest obstacle to its relevance.

Trademark and product recognition are mechanisms of consumer loyalty. DOOM and OOMedia -- and plenty of others -- are happy to maintain the appearance of opposition, all the while promoting respect for the status quo and its enforcers. Their vision of Occupy Oakland remains indistinguishable from the allegedly progressive wing of the Democratic Party machine, who assure us that they truly represent "The 99%." That's their Occupy, and if they want the copyright so bad, we say they can keep it. Despite what we may have thought was some rhetorical excess in its use, we are happy to refer to the best parts of what happened in the Plaza as the Oakland Commune.

The Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc is an ad hoc cluster of anarchist and anti-state communist individuals and affinity groups who have come together in an effort to counter the incipient growth of a self-selected cadre of professional activists and others with managerial aspirations.

Don't be such a masochist. I was told by some Italians to retrieve lion or tiger dung from the zoo and carry it in a big plastic bag, then unleash it when the horses (or the dogs) charge and watch them rear up and retreat high tailing at full speed into oncoming coppers.

This article emphasises what I've been saying; unity of the masses isn't possible till everyone is united by a common interest & since you have people coming from all across the class spectrum, not everyone is fighting for the same class, goals and we all fight differently depending how successful we are and how much we own.

Anarchist and communists seem to be the only ones working to eliminate class altogether. Most people don't want that. They want to hit the lotto one day so they can feel special and they can't feel special with everyone being equal. This is the wall we keep running into every time a new movement is born whether we invented it or not. That is why the students, teachers, union workers and mainstream people hate on us. They want the American dream and hate us for wanting to tear it all down. That is why we smash windows and burn shit and attack cops and why they give long speeches they remember and feel good about but everyone else forgets in couple of days. They only thing they can remember is our destruction because our rage is more powerful than their words.

Words mean nothing to the elite. The only thing they pay attention to is fire and destruction.

OCCUPY turned out to be nothing but a movement filled with MAJOR CONFLICTS OF INTEREST due to people having different concepts of freedom, different agendas and tactics. Total culture clash all over the fuckin place.

Best to leave it the way it is and not try to resurrect something never meant to be. You cannot unite people all across the class spectrum and expect them not to clash with one another. This will always happen everytime we attempt it. "We" as in the "99%" does not exist because "WE" are not all on the same page. Anarchists have their goals. The middle class has theirs.

Maybe if the 99% were poor and the 1% had all the money, the slogan "WE ARE THE 99" would be an excellent class analysis BUT IT'S NOT! It is so fucking flawed and far from the truth and that it's unbelievable it even gained so much acceptance while the movement was still alive. We won't be the 99% for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time from now. Maybe when the system collapses and everyone is dirt fucking poor, we will all be in this together, fighting the same fight, using the same tactics for the same agenda for a free world without borders, without hierarchy and for total liberation by any means necessary. That dream is still nothing but a dream that only exists in our minds.

I agree in the abstract, but there are Anarchists who fail to come within earshot of being institutionally middle class who contribute to anti-foreclosure movements. Somewhere outside of dogmatic theory I think there are some people who believe that if you teach and empower people you can do a lot more than watching people sink into oblivion. I'm not agreeing here but let's not label it as being liberal because poor people don't know how to squat.

I heavily agree with these bros, foreclosure defenses are totally counterrevolutionary. everyone knows that the american dream is premised on coming together with your comrades to fight cops and federal marshals and other agents of the state for the privilege of not being homeless. like you know thomas paine aka t-paine was blockading his street with couches and yelling at cops and shit, just like the fucking middle class professional activist with managerial aspirations that he was. are you all reactionary Americans, or are you in a motherfucking ad hoc cluster???????

squat defenses, on the other hand—TOTALLY REVOLUTIONARY. why don't these poor families just break the chains and embrace their radical homelessness????? or at least start listening to Conflict because that fake-ass electronic mexican music they blast out their cars is pretty much totally counterrevolutionary

Radical Homelessness - Hmmmm. First, if you added to 'family' in the status quo, you bred in captivity. The government registered your children at birth and made debt-bets on their future labor-extraction. To protect the investment of the state, Child-Protection will Steal your children if you are 'homeless' or do not otherwise allow them to be properly indoctrinated into servitude. In CPS custody, they are 7 times more likely to be raped and almost certainly will be drugged.

This is why 'making babies' is worshipped in every hollywood script - it keeps labor cheap, and gets the state leverage over you. It is much harder to fight them if you have to feed and protect your babies at the same time.

"Occupy ceased to be of much interest once the name began to be used for the implicitly middle-class strategies of foreclosure defense (homeownership being the epitome of bourgeois respectability) "

Wow, some anarchist kids are stupid as fuck. Do you realize that many of the people who lost homes were poor as fuck african-americans and latinos, and often lost generational savings with those homes? These people were often tossed out into the street with nowhere to go. I'm interested in fighting the culture of property, too, but you might try to learn something about how the foreclosure crisis worked, instead of moralizing from the vantage point of your middle-class dropout culture. If you think defending a squat from eviction is somehow entirely different than keeping a family from being thrown into the street because they've paid 20% of the value of a home you're an fucking idiot.

I think there's a cultural divide between status quo homeowners and anarchist types. Most of the homeowners in my neighborhood are snobs and treat the renters like second class citizens. I don't feel much affinity with them. To buy a home you either have to borrow money from a bank and enter into debt slavery or work really hard and save excess money to buy a conspicuous asset that requires police protection to secure. So to me home ownership is anathema.

Well, I agree. The problem is with the way people are going about conducting foreclosure defenses -- looking for exceptional cases involving little old ladies who want to pay but got fucked-over by some paperwork mistake, calling for renegotiation, etc. Critiquing these efforts is entirely different than saying that defending these people in any way is middle class.

It's called an impossible demand. Banks obviously can't renegotiate every mortgage (they can't even seem to renegotiate just one, judging by these—it's true—strategically selected foreclosure defenses). Similarly, higher education will never be free to all here in the U.S. Demanding it doesn't mean it's our goal. The point is to make a simple demand that sounds reasonable ("housing is a right") but that cannot possibly be fulfilled lest the models upon which these capitalist institutions rely collapse, or at the very least become destabilized.

The internet anarchists on this site that get in a tizzy over foreclosure defenses and radicals marching alongside anti-police Muslims must be accomplishing so much in their own daily organizing that they have the luxury of criticizing others who are trying to do something other than smash an ATM in the middle of the night on the way to their dumpstered bagels.

If you know anything about how the economy works, yes, actually it would be quite easy for the government to print money and take over the mortages from the banks, renegotiating their terms. Of course this would fuck the US balance sheet but it's already pretty fucked, and our creditors have a gun to their head. Wiping out the mortgages on the other hand would indeed be impossible...

Lololol, China has a gun to its head. Like Afghanistan, two extremes, USA caught in the middleclass dilemma even on a global scale. What's that theory, the miniscule when magnified observes the same rules, quantitative is and can only be quantitative after all!?

yeah, housing for all would also be "easy" within the current economic system. the point is that the U.S. government won't ever actually guarantee housing as a right because it would indicate a serious lack of confidence in capitalism, not to mention the american dream itself.

The point was that there are many things that the govt/banks could do that would be "easy," but for some magical reason they do not. Actually, loan modification on a massive scale would obviously torpedo stock prices and actually not be easy at all in that sense. If they won't even do it for some strategically selected little grandmother...

Anyway the real point here is that financial institutions have a lot more to lose than face when they actually act sympathetically towards a homeowner. Maybe giving in to the demands would indicate a crisis in capitalism/the definitive failure of the American dream. Foreclosure defense is a modest attempt to bring that crisis about. It's obviously not an attempt to rehabilitate the American dream. Slagging anarchists who are trying out something new is shitty. At least wait until they actually fail before heaping shit on them (although funny trolling is always welcome). I prefer such noble failures to like, opening a literal museum of squatting inside a squat that hasn't done much to inspire the milieu, much less the larger radical community, in the past couple of decades.

but the problem with this article is that it seems to think that somebody who has worked as a custodian all her life and saved up to buy a house on an subprime adjustable rate mortgage is a "have" with a piece of the pie... i guess you can't expect people to do any research or actually know anything about how homeownership or foreclosure work in terms of race or class. knowing shit is middle class, bro.

Occupy wall street was a middle class movement against corporate malfeasance.Then all the leftists and homeless people came down and jumped on the bandwagon cause it was a mass movement to attach to. In the end the clean folks with money don't want to form communes and live with stinky, dirty junkies. So guess what Occupy is not your huckleberry. Get over it, you got duped by the money people, again. It was fun while it lasted so it's not a total loss, just move on! Birds of a feather flock together.

actual radicalism thrives when there's a soft version of it floating around that starts gaining traction, like occupy. some solid people within that crowd start realizing that what they're doing isn't enough and move further toward the militant end of things. i've seen it happen, and i know many of you have, too.

not to get too topical, but it's why some secretly want obama to win. the bush years completely sucked. most of those million people who came out to protest the war still had a reason to believe in American democracy: "we need a democrat in the white house." with obama now clearly being a piece of shit, lots of those people realize that it's all indeed bullshit and have been pulled further to the left, maybe even all the way to anarchism. i know i saw that happen.

This article does not "think" nor does it do anyone a service to ignore the historical swindle that is 'property'. The table is tilted. The game is rigged. It always has been and always will be as long as capitalist power exists.

When bureaucracy enters whatever idea or intent, goodbye anarchy, hello capitalism. The structuring and accumulation of power equates to a manipulation and synthesis of social values from which a strata of omnipotence is cultured and grows into an oppressive body politic presence.

True, but I'm an expert on neo-anarchy, I have licence therefore to do whatever I want. You on the otherhand sit at home and troll communiques with your propter hoc cluster aka yourself typing on your ipad

He/she wouldn't forward email address. Talk about paranoid delusions, as if every relation ship must be sexual!! I only demand honesty, it gives me cerebral orgasms whenever I hear that distinct utterance from the heart, all the rest is constructual dross, go away! The world needs anarchists who can back-up their theory by personal example, and unfortunately instinctual desires harken to an era which we should consider defunct if we wish for this planet to survive this century. It is absurd that the capitalists have inverted what should have been a personal reining in of the bourgeois excessive credit splurge into a doctrine of 'have everything instantaneously'. Their silicone breasts and botox, their jetset holidays segmented into their slave existence as clones to the capitalist bosses itinery, the crassness of their superficial values,,,,I digress, NO PIX, FUCK YOU!

Purists have a tendency to forget about the commonalty and how they are indoctrinated into a consciousness which is not their own. Therefore you are correct! How can one be a reformist if one has no agenda of one's own?
It's easy to throw around terms like reformist and recuperative, but the litmus test is really about the the common people, how their basic human values have not been perverted by capitalist greed,,,they may be the chumps and victims on the factory floor, but they still regain their genuine humanity. They're actually the ones who will stop and help you even after working all day in a factory and without expendable income. The bourgeois wont do that, I know!

You're fucking wrong dude! Liberals are reformist, don't slot the working class into your political definitions, or else re-evaluate your terminologies. Recuperative is a more nuanced term you may wish to use in the future.

workers are just directionless bodies with no thoughts or politics of their own, just looking for their saviors in black to lead them to the promised land, right?

fuck off. workers can be, and have been historically, reformist. so how about YOU dont slot working people into your stupid abstractions that totally flatten difference. SOME WORKERS ARE ENEMIES AND SOME ARENT. SOME BOURGEOIS ARE ENEMIES AND SOME ARENT.

not that these terms *actually* mean anything outside the discourse of young mystified radical politicians.

Capitalism, but also Marxism...both create economic hierarchies...someone has to manage the people's economy ! Puss-in-boots O'riley and his vanguardist allies would be the bureaucrats under a Marxist state.

So everyone be wearing neon green instead of black? Wear is the white lady packing that petition from? "Da city" or Marin county? Isn't the stereotype claiming that "black block anarchists" are "white kids"? She's definitely no kid but she does look to be leading yet another reformist crusade. Doubtless after they save a few highly publicized mortgages they will land themselves a cushy position in some bureaucratic office somewhere. Hell they might even hit the lecture circuit and charge a cover price. How many more will be forgotten and left worse off than they were before? The function of the reformist is no less despicable than that of any other gatekeeper of the capitalist status quo!

All of these trendy kids wasting their time trolling this site speaking with forked tongues and mouths full of tofu will tell you different, but Occupy is indeed Undead. I have been keying cars and setting bonfires in garbage cans all over the Mission District in the name of the working class, and I will not stop until every last yuppie has been eradicated. I will not stop until wolves can roam free here once again, hunting their watermelon without government intervention and harassment.

Isn't it a good thing to see the break up of the g.a. and different affinity groups taking shape? I mean, more social consciousness seems to me a good thing, especially if some of it exists outside of mainstream thought. Or not, but still...one more of these and I'm hitting the bottle.

Was any of this even talked about in real time, or is this just more media fodder...did Autonomist individuals come together at any point and discuss what they wanted from this movement and talk to OO about it...This sounds too little too late. I mean I'm glad you want legitimacy here but...maybe a year ago would've been more pertinent....

it is good, but to old hands it's not exactly a liberatory breakthrough, it's just back to the old way of doing things. more fragmented until there's some big action to coordinate.

spokescouncils force the affinity group model, and one not so good thing about occupy is that some people (namely newer ones) lost faith in the spokescouncil form itself, or at least got a bad example of one in (in)action.

This would have to be one of the most bombastic and grammatically precise essays on @news I have encountered in 2012! What does it actually say or ask besides a desperate plea to make contact on a suspicious gmail address, most likely bristling with FBI probes, not that I have anything to hide, or that my level of loneliness or having some spare nickel to spend some time at an e-cafe replying to essays like this when I could be doing something else now enables me to do so. As usual the infantile banter and insults, maybe worker should implement new guidelines to allow me to express my total manifesto to the FBI? Open plazas and HD surveilance cameras at occupy zones really stocked up the data banks for the face recognition software which is the new generation of control mechanism coming to your local police department soon. No wonder some choose nihilism just like they play rolling stones in escalators and waiting rooms now, anarchism has become the middle of the road panacea for the alienated bourgeoisie.

I can't speak for anywhere else, but here in the Los Angeles area foreclosure defense is where the radicals are at.

For people who believe in anarchism as more than a lifestyle, it's important to keep comrades in their homes and to build a culture of mutual aid resistance. This way, when the squats are being evicted, homeowners whose homes have been blockaded and defended from fraudclosure join us.

You must live in a place with a serious paucity of radical interventions if the best you can do is foreclosure defense. How much cross-over of people is there between homeowners and squatters right now, not in some future utopian scheme? This constant tailing after the establishment Left (social democrats, some of whom pretend to be anarchists) is not only undignified, but it's never ever been shown to have the effect that your claiming and hoping for -- at least not in my town. What about rent strikes? What about squats that are actually habitable in the long-run instead of places for temporary urban camping? Once again, the anarchists who gravitate toward ameliorative strategies have no theory to back it up. I have not seen one anarchist (individual or group or cluster) ever provide a theoretical and/or tactical explanation for the importance of maintaining capitalist property relations. Foreclosure defense might be a good way of getting to know your neighbors, but I don't see anything meaningful beyond that. Foreclosure DEFENSE is just that: defensive. It is the strategy of trying to keep something inherent within capitalism (extracting the cash/credit reserves from poor people) from happening more quickly. But it happens constantly, not just in the last four years. The contradictions of the status quo need to be examined for their weaknesses to push them over the edge of possible reform -- that's what anarchist/radical intervention is supposed to be about, not some campaign to renegotiate the terms of a rip-off mortgage. Wouldn't it be a more interesting strategy to set up "mutual aid resistance" with your neighbors to help them declare bankruptcy and walk away from the millstone of hyper-debt, helping them get into more affordable rentals? Just a thought.

“Wouldn't it be a more interesting strategy to set up "mutual aid resistance" with your neighbors to help them declare bankruptcy and walk away from the millstone of hyper-debt, helping them get into more affordable rentals? Just a thought.”

Renting is still subservient to a landlord. It's either invasion or retreat, there is no compromise. This is watered down recuperation. Where the hell does the revolution start? It's a do or die scenario, one makes a stand by squatting rent free, this is the real occupational praxis, not public relations central business district spectacles for activist fetishers, just plain old down to earth squatting and occupation of vacant land.

7. If you try and ‘live’ your politics you will separate yourself further from other people, thereby limiting shared experiences and perspectives.

17. Many pro-revolutionaries have decent jobs and come from comfortable backgrounds and then lie about it/adopt prole accents, etc. They’ve got a safety net, have you? Don’t give too much.

6. It is possible to be pro-revolutionary and lead a normal life; don’t run away to Brighton; don’t adopt an extremist personality; don’t confuse pop/drug/drop-out culture with revolution.

Anyways … Grumpy's point was that many people in the US have lost the plot in regards to the real standard of living in this country. The chimera of suburbanism and cheap credit has obfuscated the real wages people have been beholden to for 30 or so years. Simple instruction on how to lift one's self after a fall from the American facade and professing a reevaluation of the circumstances from our most fundamental notions could go a long way. Foreclosure defense puts anarchists in the impossible situation of negotiating the isthmus of middle class aspirations and the treacherous cross-class exigencies that would follow. Being blinkered by treasure is not something anarchists should encourage.

That rent is subordination to landlords is lost on none of us, surely. Your harder-than-thou, illegalist pretension is annoying.

I hope you help some people avoid suffering, but ... No, they won't join you. They will say, "I worked hard to buy this house and those /expletive/ (squatters) didn't work at all."

Translation: "I was a good slave and sold most of the waking hours of my life to the capitalist system. In exchange for my obedience, and paying the bank 3 times what the house cost, I now have the 'privilege' to live in this 'house' forever, er, for as long as I can afford the property-tax rent to the government (which can go up at any time, well beyond my ability to pay, and/or is stolen via 'imminent domain' when some developer wants this land to build a strip-mall).

But I can't admit I've been a slave, so I'll speak in terms of my 'earning' things with 'hard work'. I will beat the living daylight out of anyone who holds up a mirror and shows me I've really just sold my life-time, the only life-time I will ever have, for a box on a piece of land - land which was my birthright that no one 'made', and sure as hell didn't need to be 'earned' from being life-raped by some opportunistic asshole and a bank. But don't even try to tell me about that, or I'll get very angry to block out reality. Life 'in the system' has made me an expert at blocking out reality with emotions in reaction to flags, my favorite 'isms', and certain music."

i.e. Plato - Myth of the Cave, Revisited

(oh wait, scratch that 3X the house cost - after the 'defense' of the system, er, re-negotiated mortgage, it was 3.5X the house-cost, paid over an additional 10 years of wage-slavery to the original indenturage, er, payment-schedule, including usury, er, interest).

==========

Essentially, four things to consider here:
1. The Land was made by no one - the Earth is everyone's birthright; everyone gets a share.
2. The house was built via people busting their asses, and those people should be able to negotiate for trade on the labor they put in.
3. Many of the house-materials had labor in them, and those laborers ... same as #2, but the Raw Materials, from the Earth, no one made, and everyone should have an equal share of those.
4. Usury - pure BS. Made-up money (literally); how can anyone insist you pay them for the privilege of using 'their' money when they simply 'made it up' by typing on a computer keyboard?

Solution:
Start with your share (right) of land at no cost. Build a cheap shelter (earth-bags is the easiest way). Slowly build the place you want as you trade stuff you make/do with others and selling your shares of the mineral resources of the Earth as they are extracted. No 'taxes' ever and no 'mortgage'. Problem solved.